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Blog by David Cotgreave

On a Zoom call with a client today, he and I were discussing how things had changed over the space of the past year. In and among the small talk, he said something about Agile vs Waterfall that got me thinking – I’ll come back to it.

First, a short recap of the last year. As I write, it’s the start of February 2021, if you’re reading this around the same time, you’ll be able to easily conjure up your own list of what’s changed. If you happen to have stumbled upon this in the future allow me to remind you.

What changed over the last year?

Everything Changed!!

Both football fans, me Manchester United, him not so much (he supports … actually, I can’t bring myself to type the word), we’re poles apart in terms of the teams we support but united in missing a night under the floodlights cheering our teams with tens of thousands of others.

We talked about a crafty pint in the pub on a Friday night after work; we touched on working from home while also home-schooling (don’t get me started on how much the way Maths is taught has changed since I was at school!!); we agreed we didn’t miss the commute but we did miss the companionship and camaraderie that it led you to; what we’d both give for watercooler moments and kettle conversations; we laughed about how “bring your own device” (BYOD) was his firm’s biggest IT security challenge a year ago (BYOD meant bringing your device from home to work – now work has come home to your device); and on and on it went.

Then he told me the Agile vs Waterfall thing. And I haven’t really stopped thinking about this since. In a nutshell, he said that due to the reactive nature of projects across his portfolio, his team’s use of Waterfall was in decline and had now all but been replaced by Agile.

Waterfall Drying Up?

To put it into context, this is a well-established project outfit. The Agile / Waterfall ratio was about 45%/55%. They hadn’t picked a “go-to methodology”, it wasn’t like me supporting Manchester United and him choosing to follow … nope, still can’t bring myself to type it. Methodologies would be chosen in the context of individual projects and there would most often be a hybrid approach (i.e., they may plan with Waterfall, and execute with Agile - or ‘Watergile’ as one PM friend calls it). Pre-Covid 19, the majority of their projects benefitted from a traditional, steady, linear approach to project management – so Waterfall was dominant.

Interestingly, this ratio is about right for the industry. In 2017, Waterfall was still used by 51% of organisations, according to the Project Management Institute’s (PMI) Pulse of The Profession report. I asked my client to share an insight into how the ratio would have evolved over the years, and, after some thought, he emailed this.

2010 Agile 10% / Waterfall 90%

2015 Agile 20% / Waterfall 80%

2019 Agile 45% / Waterfall 55%

2020 Agile 90% / Waterfall 10%

And then he projected …

2021 Agile 99%/ Waterfall 1%

I am intrigued that almost a decade after the launch of the Agile manifesto, these guys were still only executing a tenth of their projects (or elements of their projects) using Agile. Then, every five years there was, roughly, a doubling and halving of the methodologies’ respective numbers … and then came last year!

In ordinary times, charting the trajectory established over the previous decade you might...READ THE FULL BLOG >>>

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